What Hardiness Zone is Jackson?

Our beautiful landscape betrays an unrelenting and harsh reality for much of the endemic life here. Jackson can be a cold and unforgiving place for the unprepared! The winters are long and intense, with snow having fallen on every single calendar day of the year. This isn’t a rare occurrence either, with Jackson receiving inches of snow in August of 2024. Usually there is more snow on the ground than not, if you consider all the months in a year.

With that said, Jackson’s climate is considered semi-arid/alpine. We have very low humidity, which helps us achieve the dry powder snow that brings people from all over the world to ski the Tetons and beyond. However, that’s not to say we get very much rain in the summer months!

Jackson is considered Zone 4b by the U.S.D.A Plant Hardiness Zone map. The zones are “based on the average annual extreme minimum temperature during a 30-year period in the past, not the lowest temperature that has ever occurred in the past or might occur in the future”, per the USDA website. They tend to form horizontal bands across the United States, with the lower number zones in the North, and higher number zones towards the South.

But how does the climate affect the gardens here? Well, it means we generally have a pretty short growing season. Growing many vegetables can prove to be a challenge, and many perennials take quite a while to bloom. In fact, some plants that we consider annuals here are actually perennials in other zones. For example, take sweet potato vine, a common plant found in hanging baskets and planters around town. They look beautiful, and add some nice trailing and foliage elements to hanging baskets, which tend to be dominated by smaller flowers. But they can easily wither if we get a surprise frost cycle, as they don’t tolerate the cold well at all. These vines are perennials in their native range of Polynesia.

In the end, we can’t control the weather. No plant is 100% safe from Jackson’s climate. But knowing the correct zone of your garden is invaluable when considering plants for gardening in Jackson.

Maybe that hibiscus in the catalog isn’t the move, even though I desperately wish it was!